2010 Security Overkill: Why so Afraid of Protest?

Olympics security overkill: Why so afraid of protest?

By Rafe Mair, July 20, 2009, TheTyee.ca
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2009/07/20/2010Freedoms/

Less than two weeks ago, Bud Mercer, head of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit looking after security for the 2010 Olympics, raised with Vancouver City Council the specter of the violent clashes that rocked World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle and Quebec City.

To combat these forecasted dangers, the taxpayer is spending one billion dollars, at last count, and using 16,000 police and armed forces personnel!

To support this gross overkill, Mercer said, "I can assure council as I stand before you here today, that locally, provincially, nationally and internationally, there are groups that are considering or planning to engage in criminal protests during the 2010 Games. North America and Canada are not strangers to criminal protests during major events -- the 1999 Seattle WTO, 2001 in Quebec City or the Stanley Cup riot. There are things that will happen during a major event that we have a responsibility to plan and prepare for..."

Mercer added that such precautions include more than 900 cameras to guard
the perimeters of Olympic venues, the creation of "free speech" zones where protesters can legally demonstrate, and a 2010 security force of 7,000 police, 5,000 private security officers and 4,500 members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Mercer didn't define just what a "criminal protest" was but one suspects it is much different than my definition and that of many readers.

Urge to protest isn't intent to kill

Mercer and authorities ought to know, but evidently don't know, that
protesters waving banners and shouting insults don't assassinate people.
They annoy the hell out of the establishment, which some might say is an
excellent reason for encouraging them, but they don't assassinate. (I'm
not talking here of the huge riots we've seen, alas, in other lands. But
Mr. Mercer clearly isn't thinking of them either.)

The Americans have had four presidential assassinations: Lincoln,
Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. All these men were killed by a single
fanatic. Indeed, Lincoln, in the midst of a civil war, moved easily in
large crowds, as did Kennedy in his day at the height of the Cold War.

Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were killed by individual
assassins and not by picketers. Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a
single mad man, and Archduke Ferdinand, whose assassination in July 1914
triggered the First World War, was killed by an anarchist.

Mohandas Gandhi, and the unrelated sharers on his surname, Indira and Raj,
were killed not by protesters but by individual terrorists; in the case of
Mohandas and Raj Gandhi, by Hindu fanatics; and in Mrs. Gandhi's case, it
was two of her bodyguards.

Lord Louis Mountbatten died when IRA members planted a bomb on his yacht.
There have been at least three unsuccessful attempts on the lives of U.S.
presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. None were
by protesters.

Democracy needs dissent

Mr. Mercer and others of his persuasion would do well to read the law
which both here and in the United States is in clear, unadorned English.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states in section two,

"Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (b) freedom of thought,
belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other
media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) freedom
of association."

Article three of the U.S. Bill of Rights states

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Thomas Jefferson said, "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security are
deserving of neither."

Pepper spray or Tasers?

Yes, these are perilous times but the truth remains. Large crowds waving
banners and shouting slogans unto the obscene do not kill people. What
they do is make it embarrassing because, in the words of the Anglican Book
of Common Prayer, they offend "those set in authority over us."

It's interesting to note that policeman Mercer talks about special places
for protesters just as they have third amendment sites for free speech in
America. What the hell point is there in making people protest in places
where the objects of their attention are out of ear shot and thus
invisible to the media?

Does it take 16,500 cops and soldiers to ferret out potential assassins
and locate them? That, plus denying honest citizens their right to
associate and protest?

Of course not.

This is 1997 APEC revisited, where one radical youth was put in jail
several days before the parade and only released if he promised not to go
to the scene; where a young law school student was jailed for carrying a
cloth banner saying "Democracy" and "Free Speech" and where protesters
were hit with pepper spray for no greater sin than saying nasty things
about the nasty heads of state and heads of government that our
authorities didn't want embarrassed.

It was pepper spray then. Will it be Taser guns this time?

Modern day Potemkin villages

This billion dollar extravagance has, I suspect, a lot less to do with
perceived terror than giving off to the international media the image of
sweetness and light in a place where never is heard a discouraging word.
This is akin to the Potemkin villages, which were shacks with beautiful
façades created so that the visiting Tsarina, Catherine II, would believe
that this village she was visiting was a prosperous with loyal and happy
subjects.

VANOC, under considerable pressure from governments, doesn't want the
image of Canada, Vancouver or Whistler tarnished with evidence that not
everyone wanted the Olympics and that a great many people see them as bad
for society for one reason or another.

The classic reason to protest is to ask others, especially those in
charge, to see and hear the messages portrayed. Whether these protests are
against a war in Vietnam, against separate facilities for blacks, or
against heads of countries whose stated commitment to freedom is not
matched by reality, they are perfectly legal and, in fact, the
quintessential expression of the freedom which connotes a free society.

If, God forbid, there is an attack on anyone, you can be sure that it
would have happened with or without demonstrations.

VANOC's position is untenable in a free society, expensive out of all
proportion to the risk of serious harm and a huge waste of our money to
boot.